The tendency of these pursuits is to withdraw those occupied in them, from the daily business of society.They fill not the places open for them, and which they are expected to fill; even when necessity pushes them for a time into them, and compels them to mingle with the crowd, they are marked as not belonging to it.Abstract and scientific truth can only be discovered, by deep and absorbing meditation; imperfectly at first discerned, though the medium of its dull capacities, the intellect slowly, and cautiously, not without much of doubt, and many unsuccessful essays, succeeds in lifting the veil that hides it.The procedure is altogether unlike the prompt determination, and ready confidence, of the man of action, and generally unfits, to a greater or less degree, for performing well the part.He, again, who dwells in the world of possible moral beauty and perfection, moves awkwardly, rashly, and painfully, through tills of everyday life, he is ever mistaking his own way, and jostling others in theirs.To the possessors of.fortune, these habits only give eccentricity; they affect those of scanty fortune, or without fortune, with more serious ills.Unable to fight their way ably, cautiously, and perseveringly, through the bustle of life, poverty, dependence, and all their attendant evils, are most commonly their lot.
"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail,"are calamities, from the actual endurance of some of which, or the dread of it, they are seldom free.These, however, they share with other men;there are some peculiarly their own.
Pursuing objects not to be perceived by others, or if perceived, whose importance is beyond the reach of their conceptions, the motives of their conduct are necessarily misapprehended.They are esteemed either idlers, culpably negligent in turning to account the talents they have got, dullards deficient in the common parts necessary to discharge the common offices of life, or madmen unfit to be trusted with their performance; shut out from the esteem or fellowship of those whose regard they,night prize, they are brought into contact with those with whom they can have nothing in common, knaves who laugh at them as their prey, fools who pity them as their fellows.Their characters misunderstood, debarred from all sympathy, uncheered by any approbation, the "eternal war," they have to wage with fortune, is doubly trying, because they are aware, that, if they succumb, they will be borne off the field, not only unknown, but misconceived.To have merely to pass without his fame, the poet paints as a fate, capable of adding double gloom to the shades below, Sed frons laeta parum, et dejecto lumina vultu, -- Nox atra caput tristi circurnvolat umbra."What must it be to those, then, who feel, that, ere final oblivion hides them, calumny must for a time prolong the memory of their existence?
Imperfect man is ever prompt, without any consideration of the motives of the agents, to conceive of the evils he endures as of wrongs received, and to be avenged, on the doers of them.We need not wonder then, that the manifold sufferings of genius, should sometimes place it in opposition to humanity itself, and that, in the inconsistency and recklessness of passion, it should turn in anger, and in scorn, as its bitterest enemy, on that of which it is, in heart, the truest lover.
These are circumstances, largely affecting the possessors of this Faculty, even before they have succeeded in making it manifest, before they have been able to give outward shape to their inward conceptions.There are others, operating similarly, after they have succeeded in producing them.
What is really new, has to encounter obstacles of two sorts.It is the nature of men to be copiers, and, with exceedingly few exceptions, they are nothing more.Mere followers they are of rules, walkers in well-beaten paths.Whatever, therefore, is in any degree really new, being probably beyond these rules, is also beyond their judgment.Nor is this the worst;it is also very frequently in opposition to it; it disagreeably disturbs and jars the existing systems, by which men guide their feelings and reasonings.
Hence the works of almost all men of really inventive powers, have, at first, been either slighted or decried.Cervantes, one of the most powerful, and original geniuses of modern times, and who ultimately operated as largely on affairs, as any man whom they have witnessed, was placed by his contemporaries far below the subservient taste of Lope de Vigo, and, in his last days, had to turn from Don Quixote to a theme correspondent to the bombast of his age.(64) It is needless to multiply examples, - in a similar walk Tasso, and Shakspeare; in another, Hume and Montesquieu; in another, Bacon and Galileo, experienced at first either comparative neglect, or partial, or general opposition.Few names that now pass current, but rose with difficulty, and were nearly again submerged in their earlier progress, by the shock of opposing prejudices.
The practice of printing, has gradually, as it has extended the circle of readers, produced effects on the productions of genius, not here to be passed unnoticed.The author looks to what he calls the public, to those, that is, who read, or rather to his own talents for producing works that will find readers, for the pecuniary rewards of his productions.This circumstance has had much effect, both in turning the powers of men of talents to subjects that may generally interest, and in obliging them to treat them in a manner, suited to the tastes, and notions of the crowd.
